Phoenix Café (27 page)

The Warden nodded. “The sacred character records are your library, your education. Together with the Common Tongue they are in permanent feedback loop with the actuality, or
actualité
of your culture. Would you agree,” he suggested, “that the Aleutian Silent language is equivalent to the seamless discourse that for Lacan constitutes the human unconscious?”

Catherine blinked, “Lacan? Why, yes. Yes, I would.”

Michael straining against invisible bonds. A mouth sucking at her engorged clitoris, the channel up into her groin was filled, her whole body burned and flowed. Misha was watching this, agape, excruciated…Mr. Connelly chuckled, pleased at what he took for astonishment. “Like you, Miss Catherine, in another life I was a student of human philosophy. You were a Marxist once, I believe?”

“It was a while ago,” she managed.

“But you still admire Lacan. Derrida too, I suspect. All those structuralists, post-structuralists, semioticists of the Pre-Contact, so forgotten now. You know, I have often thought that their influence on Buonarotti has never been properly recognized.”

“Oh yes, ah, I agree.”

Helen leant forward to take a roll of bread from a salver. Catherine glimpsed the veil, carelessly arranged over dark hair; the pale hands, emerging from close-fitting dark sleeves. Her father glanced at his daughter with a tightening of the lips.

“But exactly what does the term ‘Signifier’ mean? To an Aleutian?”

Catherine shrugged. “Someone who sees the world as made of words. Actually, I think everybody does it, but I would, wouldn’t I?”

Mr. Connelly laughed. All the male members of the high table laughed.

“Our Silent wouldn’t agree.”

Mrs. Hunt concentrated on her food. Catherine, outrageously distracted by the drug, wondered what she’d said that was funny. She was vitally aware of Helen, a potent blank on the edge of vision.

“You must tell me something about your work among the
sous-prolé,”
her inquisitor continued, inexorable. “Our leisured classes.”

Glossolalia babbled from her lips, until at last the meal ended. It was time to retire. The paper flowers experience was over too, and she didn’t know when it had left her. “We keep early hours,” said Mr. Connelly. “The cities make their own time. Out here in the wilderness we are ruled by the real sun and the real seasons.”

Misha had disappeared, so had his sister. Domestics in female-shaped overalls were setting the hall to rights for morning. One of them offered Mr. Connelly a ball of glowing flame, which he passed to Catherine. It was cool in her hands.

“Arden is wired for communication, but not for heat or light I’m afraid. Do let Mrs. Hunt know if you feel the cold. We try to manage on piped daylight as far as possible, but we can afford you a lamp at bed time.”

She held the light bulb, dumbly.

“I very much enjoyed our conversation,” he said. “Since my reprobate son has deserted us, I wish you good night on his behalf. Sleep as late as you like.”

The journey to her room was dark and long. She knew it was dangerous. As she passed a curtained alcove between two closed doors, a hand reached out. Misha pulled her into a small rectangular space, brightly lit by a cluster of bulbs slapped onto the wall. It had been a bathroom in another life. The bath, a massive white open pod, was half full of empty packaging, disintegrating plastic sacks, padding granules, paperboard.

He was grinning. “You made a great impression.”

“I talked too much, I make speeches, I can’t help it.”

“Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh shit.” He grabbed her, crushing the folds of the lathyrus robe, burying his face in the scent, tearing the delicate fabric as he hunted for her skin. “I’m in fucking
agony,”
he gasped. “The old man likes you,” he gabbled. “Never seen him so taken with anyone, you can say what you like to him, you realize that? He doesn’t give a bugger; I realized that a long time ago. He lives in a fortress somewhere else, he looks out and gets amused by our antics far away, but we can’t touch him.”

He pushed her down on the ice hard rim of the bath and punched his frantic erection wildly at her bared crotch. Catherine sobbed as his claw entered, grabbed his shoulders, locked her ankles in the small of his back, their bodies bucketing like rocks falling down a mountain. He was still muttering as they coupled,
old man likes you, old man likes you.
When they finished: finished, or suddenly neither could stand any more, she was astride him. He pushed her off and rolled free. “You’ve got to bumfuck me.” He slumped in the rubbish filled tub, groping to cover himself. “I think I’ve broken my back. Got to have your dick up my arse. How can this be? Mother Vlab will provide. Next time. Soon. Got to come down now. Got to give this stuff up, soon. Soon. I’m dying. Go on, go to your room. Go.”

She blundered out into the hallway. Her robe was in tatters. She dropped her light bulb and it rolled away. A little cleaner, interrupted in its night-time job of picking lint from the carpet, fussed around this strange obstacle with the unhappy air of a simple soul helpless before the unexpected. She crawled to retrieve the light and stayed down, unable to get back to her feet. She spoke in tongues to the father while the son, at a sly remove, shafted her, absolutely
shafted
her under the patriarch’s table. The mysterious Helen sat with her head bowed while Mrs. Hunt chewed discreetly. Mrs. Hunt, ersatz woman. Should that be woman
sous rature?
A concept partly erased, inadequate but essential. She clambered to her feet and stumbled, giggling, to her room.

ii

Sometime later, perhaps an hour in human reckoning, Catherine unfolded from a catatonic crouch and got down from the bed-with-legs. She went to her bathroom and dumped the rags of the lathyrus robe in the waste bucket. She was wearing Expedition uniform overalls underneath. She’d decided that this was the dress her host would expect of her for a formal dinner. Misha had torn the closures of suit and underwear, but the fabric had recovered while she was in her trance.

She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the woolen rug. She wanted to know more about Helen. She was convinced, by things spoken and unspoken, that there was some mystery her Renaissance friends wanted to reveal to her: but, for whatever reason, they didn’t dare. Something to do with Traditional young ladies. The snake-toy girl at the police station. Helen Connelly.

What if she used her password and asked to speak to Miss Helen? A voice would answer, an image would materialize on the reader screen: void-force, deadworld things, completely untrustworthy. Besides, there were lurkers in this net. Besides, she particularly needed to meet Helen in the flesh. She decided to go and look for Helen’s room. The house wasn’t large. It shouldn’t be difficult. If Misha’s sister had not wanted to meet Catherine she would not have come down to dinner. On the strength of this silent message, she believed Helen was waiting, expecting her. A door would open and she would be beckoned inside. Out in the corridor the walls and ceilings glowed dimly: She carried her fading light bulb, stepping cautiously, finding her way easily to the gallery above the entrance hall. Was this subtle glow piped starlight? She could hear music, old, Pre-Contact human music, as faint as if it came from the stars.

She followed the sound along a passage that led at right-angles from the gallery and down a small flight of steps to a heavily curtained doorway. The door behind the curtain was ajar, showing a line of light. She pushed it open.

The room was no larger than her own bedroom, wainscoted and lined with bookcases to the ceiling. The walls between the cases were covered in dark blue hide, stamped with a silver pattern a
fleur de lys.
Two armchairs, one studded hide, one upholstered in brocade, flanked a fireplace. There was a glowing fire. A table-desk, covered in books and papers, a multi-media rack like the one in her room. An array of old and beautiful musical instruments. Directly in her line of sight stood a virtual screen, half lifesize. It showed the scene invoked by the music: a young girl, surrounded by fluttering attendants, like a flower in a snowstorm; like a white butterfly. They were dressing her, preparing her for her bridal. Catherine found the image extremely disturbing, she didn’t quite know why. She had lived on Earth before. She knew human weddings. The music faltered, with a sound like grit snarling in a tiny mechanical gear. Mr. Connelly stood up. He was halfway across the room before he saw Catherine.

“Good evening!” He continued on his way and carefully removed, from one of the antique instruments, a large black disk. He studied it minutely. “My music has drawn you from your lair. Come and look at this, Catherine.”

He laid the disk back on the platter, picked up a small block of red velvet and rubbed it against his palm. “Dust lodged in a scratch. A little grease from the skin,” he murmured, smoothing velvet over the moving surface. “This is a Linn Sondek. It is three hundred and sixty years old. It does nothing in the world except go round and round and round. But it does so
perfectly.
The arm is not original,” he added apologetically, shifting a lever so that another part of the instrument dropped slowly onto the disk. “Unfortunately. Neither is the vinyl, though it’s very old. Yet the reproduction of time past is ‘nature identical,’ I think we could say. You like Puccini? A wonderful artist. He takes the grief of the world and transforms it into exquisite pleasure.”

“He does. The grief always seems to be a bit one-sided though. Poor Butterfly.” Then she was afraid this remark was gender politics: but Mr. Connelly didn’t seem offended.

“Is there anything you’d like to hear? I have an extensive archive.”

The fire was made of flowers, golden chrysanthemums that burned and were not consumed. She’d seen the effect before; it was still a beautiful design. The big virtual screen had vanished.

“I miss the twentieth century,” she said. “The era that was your past, your immediate cultural history, when we first arrived. What happened to that stuff? I didn’t notice the loss in my last life, because of the War. It seems strange now. Misha’s Renaissance friends have resurrected
musique naturelle,
but they seem never to have heard the songs that were ‘immortal classics’: Bob Dylan. The Beatles.”

“Ah, that was the intellectual property wars,” sighed Mr. Connelly. “As destructive as the War itself, in some respects. Wonderful art vanished forever in those wrangles. I have some very rare works.”

But he didn’t repeat his offer.
Madame Butterfly
continued to play, Mr. Connelly returned to the hearth. A supper tray stood by his chair: cheese and savories in a silver dish, chunks of bread, a decanter of whisky. He looked at Catherine with a new interest. “Did you know, Miss Catherine, that the word for patriarch and father,
pere, pater,
derives from the sign, the gesture of a platter of food? The father provides. Will you eat with me?”

He offered the dish, with a speculative gleam. They were alone.

“No thank you. It’s too late for me.”

Mr. Connelly laughed and picked up his whisky glass. “How do you like my house? Oh, I know what you think, I saw it in you: and I’d love to rebuild. I’d remodel the place, get rid of the military element, so
passé!
I can’t afford it, because I don’t know how to grovel. I only know how to protect, to preserve, to keep the pure human traditions alive. I do my duty. But nobody has rights, duties, privileges these days, only more or less money. Those who have the money may screw the brains out of those who have not, and that is the whole of the law.”

“What were you watching?”

“Eh? Watching?”

“When I came in. It didn’t somehow look like the scene from
Butterfly.”

“It was nothing. A soap-opera episode from my archives.” He set the glass down, carefully. “I’d forgotten that Aleutians like to socialize at night. You must feel we’ve neglected you.”

“Not at all,” said Catherine. “I’m sleepy now. I’ll go back to bed.”

She resolved always to wear overalls in Mr. Connelly senior’s company, and not to be alone with him. Another time he might make that offer of “protection” more pressing. But though he could speak Aleutian, or at least understand it, much better than his son, his attitude to the alien belonged to another age. Aleutian uniform would keep him at arm’s length, reminding him she wasn’t what she seemed. The boundary between Misha and Michael was blurred enough without her being actually, physically raped by both of them. She fell asleep wondering about that screen. It seemed poor taste, not Mr. Connelly’s taste, to watch ugly ancient virtual fiction in that exquisite antique study.

She dreamed of a house where all the doors opened outwards, onto limitless space. But as she opened them, with a sense of great gladness, she had an unpleasant feeling of something going on behind her, where she was aware of a muffled, heavy slithering and scrabbling. Finally she managed to turn her head, and saw the room called Wilson. She was looking down as if from the ceiling, the wooden floor and the woolen rug had become transparent. Looking down through the dining hall in the basement, to a deeply buried undercroft. It was a stark pit divided into blurred pens with high partitions. Someone was down there. It was Mr. Connelly, in a different suit of overalls. The skin of his face and hands glistened, he was wearing quarantine. He looked over a partition: she had a sensation of falling, and received his view. The imprisoned animals were naked, clean and plump. Their movement, over each other, against each other (the pens were crowded) was the sound she had heard. Their faces reminded her, horribly, of the bridal scene she’d glimpsed.